1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the filling of a storage facility, such as a silo, with livestock feed materials, such as silage, and more particularly, is concerned with a silage distributor apparatus operable to receive, deflect and distribute a flowing stream of silage so as to achieve a substantially uniform distribution of the constituents of the silage within the silo.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A farm silo is conventionally filled through a center opening in its roof using a discharge pipe which runs up the side of the silo and arcs over its roof to the central opening. The lower end of the pipe is connected to a silage blower into which silage is unloaded from a wagon. Thus, in the filling operation, silage is blown through the discharge pipe, out of its upper end and into the silo through its central opening.
Silage by nature is composed of large and small, heavy (dense) and light constituents. In filling the silo with blown silage, normally, the heavier or more dense constituents build up in a pile in the center of the silo, while the lighter constituents roll down to the outer periphery of the pile and accumulate along the silo wall. This is particularly true in the case of silage composed of ground ear corn. The heavier, high protein, ground kernels accumulate in the center of the silo and the lighter, lower protein, ground cobs are blown to the silo wall. Thus, a non-uniform mixture of the constituents results across the cross-section of stored silage.
This is undesirable because as the silo is unloaded later, either by a conventional top or bottom type unloader, the constituent proportions in successive portions of the silage will be different and, therefore, the portions will be non-uniform in nutritional value. Usually, and especially with the bottom unloader, silage containing more of the centrally-located, heavier and higher protein constituents will be unloaded first and thus fed to livestock early in the year, whereas silage containing more of the less nutritional and lighter material will be unloaded and fed to the livestock later in the year. The probable detrimental effects on the livestock feeding program resulting from the initial non-uniform storage of the silage are readily apparent.
Various silage distributors have been employed in the past in the upper regions of silos for distributing silage in various patterns. Representative of the prior art are the silage distributors disclosed in U.S. Patents to Stoltzfus (U.S. Pat. No. 3,175,668), Berger (U.S. Pat. No. 3,349,929), Shankland (U.S. Pat. No. 3,422,972), Donelson, Jr. (U.S. Pat. No. 3,485,536), Hanson (U.S. Pat. No. 3,640,409), Mitchell (U.S. Pat. No. 3,885,684), Hungerback (U.S. Pat. No. 4,111,315) and Suwyn (U.S. Pat. No. 4,395,182). Distributors used elesewhere are shown in U.S. Patents to Dill (U.S. Pat. No. 1,684,478), Howland (U.S. Pat. No. 1,763,396) and Weaver (U.S. Pat. No. 3,977,543). While many of these devices would appear to operate reasonably well and generally achieve their objectives under the range of operating conditions for which they were designed, most seem to embody shortcomings which make them less than an optimum mechanism for distributing silage in a uniform and reliable manner. For instance, some distributors employ a motor to rotate a silage deflector plate or blade but the motor is ordinarily fixedly anchored in place and cannot be removed except inconveniently and with some difficulty. Also, since the distributor is located high up in the silo there is no way to continuously monitor whether or not it is actually working. Knowing whether the motor is turned on or not is no guarantee that the motor is actually rotating the distributing device of the distributor. In addition, some distributors are complicated to adjust to change the pattern of distribution.
Consequently, there still exists a need for improvements which will provide an even and uniform distribution of silage while at the same time ensure reliability and facilitate maintenance of the distributor.